Campaign of the Month:
January 2011

Honour Among Thieves

Athens

Athens is a rim planet known primarily for its agriculture. It is said that if you don’t like the weather on Athens, just wait five minutes and it will change. Athens is the ninth planet orbiting Georgia.

Athens’ wartime history is complicated. It is claimed that some of the opening shots in the Unification War were fired during an Alliance patrol of its moons, but by and large the planet’s population supported Unification. There is no doubt, however, that Athens was the target of a large-scale Independent insurgency, especially in its urban centres. Control of the planet shifted back and forth between the Alliance and the Independents, and battlefield reports showing that, man for man, the Browncoats were more than a match for Alliance ground troops were cause for significant embarrassment for the Alliance brass. The Athens campaign was sapping manpower from more strategic theatres (not coincidentally, this was the Browncoat plan all along).

This turn of events resulted in a heavy-handed response from the Alliance, who could not let such a brazen challenge go unpunished. The planet’s urban population was decimated during massive bombing campaigns to drive the Browncoats from the planet’s cities. This didn’t bother the rural farmers much, since they tended to look down their noses at the city folk even at the best of times. Refugees from the bombing were relegated to tent cities on the edges of the ruins, or accepted as indentured labourers on the farms that continued to prosper even as the war continued.

The bombed-out ruins have recently been opened up for salvage, and Unified Reclamation has established a strong presence on the planet, issuing salvage licenses to ambitious scavengers.

The Corone Mining Consortium runs a large-scale marble quarrying operation on Athens, shipping most of it out of Stanton Gap, the largest surviving city on the planet. Corone hires its share of menial labour from the willing pool of urban refugees who still struggle to get by.

Athens has four moons, all of which are terraformed and open for business: Ahnooie, Argabuthon, Ormuzd, and most famously, Whitefall. It is said that the moons are a damn sight nicer than the planet they orbit these days, although Whitefall isn’t exactly civilization in the strictest sense.